Forever and a Day

by Anthony Horowitz

  He took a step towards her. ‘This time it’s going to be different. You’re going to tell me what I want to know.’

  ‘Oh yes? And how do you propose to get it out of me?’

  It was all the invitation he needed. In fact, he hadn’t wanted to be invited. He had already decided to take what he wanted and to hell with the consequences.

  He grabbed hold of her and drew her against him, pressing his mouth onto hers and forcing his tongue between her lips. He could feel her breasts, large and warm, against his chest and swept his arms around her, drawing her close. He didn’t expect her to resist and was surprised to find both his wrists suddenly clamped in her hands. For a moment he stared at her, puzzled. Had he misread the signals? But then, with a mischievous smile, she lowered herself onto her knees, pulling him down onto the rug with her. Still she held him, not allowing him to come close. Bond could feel the passion rising in him but he got the message. If this was going to continue, it would be on her terms.

  It was a new experience for Bond. Sixtine was older than him. She’d been married. She might even have a child. All of this put her in a different place, a world apart from the many girls he had slept with, often only once. Kneeling on the rug, locked in her arms, which were still warning him to keep his distance, Bond examined the deep brown eyes, the lips, the voluminous black hair. The years had done her no harm at all; in fact they had elevated her, giving her an aura of experience and confidence that he found strangely attractive. The first woman he had ever slept with had been six years older than him – he’d been still in his teens – and he remembered how much greater the age difference had seemed at the time. He felt that same sense of daring now. Bond wanted Sixtine but he knew that he had to wait for her to give her assent and part of him cursed the fact that even now, in this intimate moment, she insisted on playing games.

  Slowly, she nodded. The music had changed. He could hear ‘La Vie en Rose’ whispering around him.

  Bond pulled her towards him.

  Afterwards, when they had finished, she stood up and walked out of the room, leaving Bond on his own. It was dark outside but there was a Tiffany light glowing on a table. Bond got dressed and threw back his champagne, then helped himself to some more. When Sixtine returned, she was wearing a satin dressing gown fastened at the waist and nothing else. Her hair was wet. She had been in the shower.

  ‘Well, if that’s your interview technique, I have to say I like it,’ she said. She noticed his glass. ‘I see you’ve helped yourself.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course not.’ She found a packet of cigarettes and lit one. ‘I have some fresh fish and salad in the refrigerator. I’m not a good cook. I don’t do sauces or special recipes. If it takes more than five minutes to prepare, I’m not interested. But there’s also the champagne and I have a decent bottle of Puligny-Montrachet. Will you stay for dinner?’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Bond said.

  ‘You can lay the table – the one in the garden.’ She pointed. ‘The plates are in the cupboard.’

  She went back into the kitchen. Bond opened the cupboard and found plates and sets of cutlery … but only two of each. Sixtine lived here alone and obviously didn’t encourage too many guests. He carried what was needed outside, thinking it had been years since anyone had asked him to lay a table.

  A few minutes later she joined him, holding the wine, which she held out for him to open. It was good to feel the chill of the bottle in his hands. ‘I bought the house just after the war,’ she said. ‘I like to have as many properties as possible. I never know where I’m going to be.’

  ‘There are a lot of things I want to know about you,’ Bond replied. ‘But to be honest, I don’t give a damn when you got this house.’ He felt a wave of tiredness. Suddenly he was disgusted with himself … this play-acting … happy families. ‘For God’s sake, Sixtine. A friend of mine, a good friend, was shot in Marseilles. And this morning a pretty girl who had never done anyone any harm was run over and killed in front of my eyes, simply because she’d met the wrong man. You have a beautiful house and this is a beautiful part of the world but it’s all been poisoned. Scipio and his men, Ferrix Chimiques, Irwin Wolfe … there’s something very ugly going on and whatever may have happened between you and me, that’s the only reason why I’m here.’

  She stopped and looked at him and he saw that he had hurt her.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I understand exactly what sort of man you are, James, and I know why you’re here. But we have this moment together so why don’t we enjoy it? Let’s have dinner together like two people who have found each other and who have just made love.’ She paused, allowing her words to sink in. ‘And then I’ll tell you everything you want to know.’

  14

  Secrets and Lies

  They had dinner in the garden with the swimming pool shimmering behind them and the stars crowding out the night sky. Everything was silent. The cicadas had decided enough was enough. True to her word, Sixtine had prepared the simplest of meals: grilled fish, salad, cheese she had picked up from the Marché de la Libération in Nice, fresh bread. They sat next to each other at the table and for a while they didn’t speak. There was a part of Bond that was uneasy, at war with himself. As much as he now saw that it was inevitable they should have become lovers, he was worried that he had confused the situation and that he might come to regret it. Put bluntly, it was still quite possible that she was his enemy.

  As if sensing what was on his mind, she levelled her eyes on him and said, without emotion: ‘Do you still want information?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought we might enjoy the evening together.’

  ‘I’ll enjoy learning more about you.’

  She considered. ‘What do you want to know, James? Was I responsible for the death of your friend? No. Or the girl this morning? I don’t even know who she was. You asked me what I was doing here in the south of France. Why should I tell you? You know nothing about me and unless it’s connected to your work, you care even less.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’ Bond lifted his wine glass and swirled the honey-coloured liquid in the palm of his hand. Puligny-Montrachet is one of the few wines that can trace its origins back to Roman times and he enjoyed it as much for its age and antiquity as its taste. ‘I want to know everything about you. Not just what you’re doing here in France. You’re obviously quite an operator. My office in London has a healthy respect for you and I can see that you’ve enjoyed putting me in my place. But why don’t we leave the games behind us now? Why don’t you tell me about yourself?’ He put his hand on his chest. ‘I cross my heart it’ll go no further than where we are now. If we’re both on the same side, it seems crazy to have secrets from each other.’

  ‘If we’re both on the same side …’ She let the words hang in the air. ‘All right.’ She held out her glass and Bond refilled it. ‘But if you betray me, if you make any move against me, I will never forgive you, James. More than that, I will make sure you regret it. Just because I’ve given myself to you tonight, don’t think I belong to you. The opposite is true. Because of tonight, part of you belongs to me.’

  Bond said nothing. He waited for her to begin.

  ‘You may be surprised but I was born in New Zealand. I don’t even remember the place, really. My father was from France. He was an engineer and he’d been invited down there to work on the main trunk line from Auckland to Wellington. My mother made dresses. I was there for the first five years of my life and I remember almost nothing about that time except that I felt bored and trapped. There were only about a million people living in the entire country and everything was very ordinary, very safe. It was all beige. Nice little houses with nice little gardens but I don’t think I was a nice little girl. I was glad when the work finished and my father announced that we would have to move back to Paris. I can still remember the excitement I felt as I packed my suitcase. Paris – even the word – was like something out of a fa
iry story. It was the secret door that was going to take me to a new life. How could I have known that we were going to arrive just in time for the outbreak of a world war?

  ‘It’s hard for me to describe my feelings about the city a month after we got there. On the one hand, there was the glamour: the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, the boulevards, the shops with their huge windows that made Auckland look like the nowhere it had always been. But at the same time, there were guns everywhere. People were afraid. The Germans were getting closer and closer – at one stage they were just fifteen miles away and hundreds of taxis turned up to carry French soldiers to the front. I actually saw them leave and thought how ridiculous it was, that all these young men should get into taxis to take them to their death.

  ‘By now, my mother was working in a defence factory. My father had got a job helping to build the railway from Montparnasse to Porte de Vanves. I didn’t see either of them very much. I was looked after by a neighbour, an old lady who smelled of sour milk and who talked to her cats. I think I was a very angry child. After the first excitement, Paris was a disappointment to me. I was trapped in a small flat in Montrouge, which isn’t even part of the city. It’s a suburb in the south. I’d learned to speak French from my father but I didn’t have any friends. I went to a school that was run by nuns and they were vicious. The food was horrible. In a way, those were the days that made me what I am because if there was one thing I learned it was to be self-sufficient. I had to find the strength to look after myself.’

  She fell briefly silent, looking into her wine glass as if it could provide some window into her past life. The robe she was wearing was unfastened at the collar and Bond found himself examining the line of her throat and the valley below. Her hair was still damp from the shower and it suited her, making her look more wild and unpredictable. The moon was behind her and the shadows wrapped themselves around her.

  Eventually, she went on.

  ‘Every day, I prayed that things would change and they finally did, though not in the way that I had hoped. On 30 August 1914, my mother was killed by a German bomb that fell onto the Rue des Vinaigriers when she was on her way home from work. It was a completely random event. A German pilot was flying a Taube. That’s the German word for “dove”. He dropped three bombs by hand. One of the bombs fell into the chimney of a building and blew up a flat. It was the third bomb that killed my mother … as far as I know she was the first civilian ever to be killed in an air raid. In fact, there were three other casualties although nobody else was killed. It was completely hushed up at the time. The French were worried about morale. My father only told me what had really happened a few weeks before the war ended.

  ‘By that time, everything was over for him. He hadn’t been able to cope after my mother died. I’ve always believed that women are much stronger than men. We take the cards that life has dealt us and get on with it. Without our support, men just crumple and give up. That was how it was with him. He was drinking heavily … and I don’t even know how he managed it because alcohol wasn’t so easy to find. Sometimes he didn’t seem to know who I was. I can still see him now. He had been a handsome man but he didn’t eat and he didn’t look after himself. He had eyes that stared at me as if he was wondering how I had got there. It was like he was collapsing into himself and I wasn’t at all surprised when I came home from school one day to find the neighbour sitting in our empty flat. She told me he was dead. She said he died of a broken heart but it’s more likely that he killed himself. I never found out. What difference did it make to me? Either way, I was alone.

  ‘When the war ended, I was sent to England. It turned out that I had an aunt who lived in London, in Pimlico, and she agreed to take me in. I don’t need to tell you very much about the next few years. I grew up. I went to school. People talk about “the roaring twenties” but they never really roared for me. There were jazz clubs and cocktail bars all over London. Women were beginning to break out. They were smoking cigarettes and driving cars, wearing the clothes they wanted to wear. People talked about “flappers”. You would still have been in short trousers, James. I’m sure it means nothing to you. It hardly meant anything to me, either. I was growing up with my aunt Lucy and she did everything she could to protect me from the world outside. Or maybe she was trying to protect the world from me.

  ‘It’s funny to think how ordinary everything was for me and how quickly I settled into what might have become my new life. I went to secretarial college and started working for an insurance company in Knightsbridge with radiators that were turned on full and plants on the windowsills and a tea trolley that came round every day at eleven o’clock in the morning and four in the afternoon. Aunt Lucy made me sandwiches and I would go out when the sun was shining and eat them in the park. There were other girls there and we got on well enough. They used to talk about the boys they were seeing and I wondered how much longer I was going to be alone. One of the underwriters took a liking to me and he drove me to Clacton in his Austin Seven and that was about as glamorous as it got.

  ‘And then everything changed when I met Danny.’

  She hadn’t been eating her food, chasing it around the plate with her fork instead, and now she gave up altogether. She reached for her cigarettes. She smoked Morlands, the brand she had mentioned. Her cigarette was slim and elegant with a single silver band. She lit it. The flame leapt up briefly, reflecting in her eyes.

  ‘Danny Salgado – that was what he called himself,’ she went on. ‘We bumped into each other outside Knightsbridge station, quite literally, and he invited me for a drink. He was dark-haired, a few years older than me, expensively dressed. He wore a hat. Now that I think about it, he looked a bit like you but maybe a little more worldly. He had an extraordinary charm. That was the thing about him. The way he smiled at people, they sort of fell in love with him without a second thought and he knew it. He could turn it on with waiters, with police officers, with anyone he fancied. I saw him do it. It was like a technique. I’d never met anyone like him but you have to remember that I was still in my twenties and I’d been living half my life with a spinster aunt. I didn’t know much about anything.

  ‘Danny told me that he was a business adviser. I wasn’t even sure what that meant but from the very start he made it clear that he didn’t like talking about his work. All I knew was that he worked with a lot of very important people. He was always travelling and he always went first class. Later on, I discovered he had three passports. I found out a lot of things about Danny but only when it was too late. Anyway, he took me for dinner that night – to Kettner’s in Soho. I had never been anywhere like it but everyone seemed to know him. He bought champagne and when it was time to pay, he scattered five-pound notes like they were meaningless to him. The bill was almost a week’s salary for me. “Plenty more where that came from, Jojo,” he would say. Jojo was what he called me and he was always saying cheesy things like that but somehow he made them sound all right. He loved jokes. He was the sort of man who could start a party just by walking into the room.

  ‘I didn’t sleep with him that night. In fact, it was a long time before I let him take me. He was the first man I’d ever been to bed with and I wanted to know him as a friend before I took him as a lover.’ She smiled wistfully, smoke trickling between her fingers. ‘It was easy to become friends with Danny. He had a suite of rooms at the Dorchester and that’s where he made a dishonest woman of me. When I woke up the next morning, he’d already gone but he left a note for me and a few minutes later there was a knock at the door and a bellboy came in with a huge bunch of flowers, champagne and breakfast on a trolley. We saw each other again a few days later and already he was urging me to give up work and move in with him – even though I didn’t actually know where he lived.

  ‘Danny and I got married three months later at Chelsea registry office. Aunt Lucy came to the service and I can still see her sitting there, trying to be happy for me when actually she disapproved. She was scared for me, I think. She must have
known intuitively what sort of man Danny was but she never spoke a word against him. She didn’t believe it was her business even though she was sure it wouldn’t end happily and she was right. She’s dead now. She died quite young and I miss her terribly. She was the only close friend I ever had.

  ‘I was very happy for the first couple of years. Danny had bought a flat in Heddon Street, close to Piccadilly. At first I assumed it was for both of us although actually it was just for me. He gave me an allowance and he was generous. We travelled together – to Cannes, to Vienna, to Rome and to Malta. We stayed in the best hotels and went to wonderful restaurants. Danny was a gambler and he took me with him to the casinos. He was the one who introduced me to vingt-et-un. He always said it was the one casino game where you could actually beat the house, which was ironic in view of what happened. He taught me how to memorise the order of an entire pack of cards. I can still do it to this day. And he also showed me how to work out exactly how many cards the dealer was holding just by glancing at his hands. I spent hours and hours learning that, not because I thought it would be useful but because I wanted to please him.’

  Bond had also stopped eating. He poured himself some more wine and settled back in his chair. He wondered why Sixtine was telling him all this. Perhaps it was because, although she would never admit it, she was lonely. He had thought that when he saw her for the first time at the casino. Who she was and what she did had set her apart from the rest of the world, and perhaps what she craved more than anything else was intimacy in every sense. Again, for someone who traded in information, freely opening herself up to him was the most effective way of lowering the barriers between them. She really did want him to believe that they were on the same side.

  ‘My love affair with Danny ended pretty much the day I got pregnant,’ Sixtine said. ‘Although I didn’t see it at the time. He was so happy when I told him. There were more flowers. Dinner at the Ritz. An expensive doctor in Cavendish Square. But at the same time, it was as if a switch had been thrown and he no longer felt comfortable with me. I knew it at once when he was in bed with me a few days after I’d told him and it was as if he wasn’t there. His whole manner towards me changed. He’d always made me feel special but now his eyes would flicker over me as if I’d become part of the furniture. He used to be someone I could talk to but now it was just a few sentences and he would be gone as soon as he could.’ She sighed. ‘I’m making it sound melodramatic but actually it was very ordinary. Isn’t that how marriage works? The days go by and you settle into a routine and piece by piece everything is taken away from you until there are two complete strangers sitting in the same room.